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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Cranberry Boggin’

My youngest son and I went on an adventure today out to Long Beach to pick cranberries. Every year I run out of fresh cranberries long before I get tired of them. Mainly because I adore my friend Lois’ cranberry sauce recipe! This year I wondered if I could can the sauce and have it all year round??? So, I asked a canning expert/teacher and she said it was a go for canning! But that meant I needed a whole LOT of fresh cranberries!

We also happen to live only an hour from the Washington coast where they grow cranberries. And there happens to be a lovely little cranberry farm in Long Beach that lets you u-pick your own, Cranguma Farms. And they are only 50 cents a pound! It was totally worth the gas to drive out, so I picked up Will from school at noon and we drove out to the coast…

When we got to the farm we discovered that the bog had already been flooded. This would make picking difficult but scooping easy. Unfortunately, we didn’t bring waders. :o( But they did provide us with the nifty pails for scooping!

So, off we went to the water’s edge to scoop out our cranberries. The problem was you also scooped up a whole lot of leaves! Little tiny sticky leaves…

First, you scoop them out along with a whole bunch of leaves and a whole bunch of water. All the while being very careful not to get your shoes wet. Then you carefully drain the water off and drop the whole messy bunch in a bucket.

After getting 20 pounds of leafy cranberries, I decided I wasn’t sure it was worth all the work to save 50 cents a pound when there was a giant bin full of already picked and clean cranberries just ready to fill my bin. So, we quit.

In the end, we brought home 50 pounds of cleaned berries and 20 not-so-clean berries…

We’re working on the cleaning issue right now. We’ll let you know how it goes… :o)